• Further test a combined race and Hispanic-origin question to increase reporting within the standard Office of Management and Budget categories, "to decrease nonresponse, improve accuracy and increase detailed reporting."

• If the Hispanic-origin question is kept separate, allow multiple responses by explicitly including the "mark one or more" instruction, making it consistent with the race question and giving respondents the option to report their full self-identified origin.

• Remove the term "Negro" from the "Black, African American or Negro" response category because of concern over term, which is considered archaic.

'Hispanics' as a 'race' on census?

The census is proposing a controversial change to 2020 census forms: to collapse two questions on race and ethnicity into one, creating a "Hispanic race" category. However, on the census forms from 1940, there were only eight choices for the "Color or race" column: White, Negro, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu and Korean. There were no Latino choices, so Latinos were marked white.

On this sheet from the 1940 census are several San Antonio respondents with Caucasian surnames, and they are marked "W" for white in the "Color or race" column.

On this sheet, also from the 1940 census, are several San Antonio respondents with Latino surnames, who are also marked "W" for white in the "Color or race" column.

In the 1970s, the federal government instituted the word “Hispanic” to get a better handle on a mushrooming demographic group that was multiracial and multiethnic.

In spite of criticism, that label stuck.

Now the census is proposing a potentially more controversial change: to collapse two questions on race and ethnicity into one, creating a “Hispanic race” category.

Congress won't decide it until 2018, when the wording of the 2020 census is approved. But Latino advocacy groups, scholars and others are criticizing the category as inaccurate, inadequate and ludicrous.

“'Hispanic' is not an ethnicity or a race,” said longtime San Antonio activist Irma Mireles.

Artist Roland Mazuca agreed. “It is absurd. We are mestizo, not a race of people.”

Dr. Fernando A. Guerra, who retired as director of health at the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, calls it “a mistake, given the longstanding anthropological classification of Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasian races that have served demographers, anthropologists and public health data gatherers and analysts quite well.”

The proposed changes are part of the Census Bureau's 2010 Alternative Questionnaire Experiment Report, in which a half-million households received varying questions to see how the responses differed.

The results prompted several recommended changes, including the elimination of the word “Negro” in its race question, a proposal many regard as long overdue.

But preliminary results already show an increase in responses, which have lagged among Hispanics.

In the 2010 census, more than half of Hispanics identified themselves as “white.” Thirty-seven percent answered “some other race.”

“That's how you know there's a problem,” said Professor Jorge Chapa of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The data on race is not very good when 37 percent say essentially 'none of the above.'”

People have reacted emotionally to the proposed change. “That's important,” Chapa said, but they need to see the broader view.

Since 2000, people have been able to mark one or more race, but only one Hispanic ethnicity.

While the latter is an easier question (except perhaps for those who are, say, half-Mexican American and half-Puerto Rican), Chapa said the race question has confused some respondents.

Some Latinos don't regard themselves as white, black or any of the other choices. Some might identify as mestizo, a mix of European and indigenous, but that does not appear in the census form.

“That's their genetic heritage,” Chapa said, speaking specifically of Mexican Americans. “They're European white as well as Native American or Indian. There's Asian and African heritage mixed there, too.”

Asking about race poses other issues.

“The way (Latinos) identify their race definitely is not what others would identify them as,” Chapa said. “People in the same family might self-identify differently and may look differently.”

In spite of such issues, the prospect of getting better information makes a “Hispanic race” category in the 2020 census a good idea, he said.

In an essay for the National Institute for Latino Policy, she said a “Hispanic race” question would result in less-detailed ethnic data, which would hurt the monitoring of discrimination in housing, jobs, political participation, education, health and criminal justice.

“If we collapse race and ethnicity as interchangeable concepts, we may miss the opportunity to examine whether there are unique experiences among co-ethnics that may occupy very different racial statuses,” she said. “It will be challenging to capture the two concepts with one question.”

Hispanics don't see ethnicity and race as separate, he said, “so I'm assuming the Census Bureau is wanting to get away from this sort of dual concept.”

“I can't offer an opinion here,” he added. “It's both good and bad. But one of the things I can say is, it's useful to come up with a description for people's ancestry that wasn't confusing.

“Do I think moving to a classification of Hispanics as race is a solution? I don't,” Potter said. “There's no easy answer to this.”

Any change on race in census forms will be problematic, said Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy and head of a former census committee on Hispanics.

“Some (Latinos) find it offensive to ask about race,” he said.

Falcon, who has not decided whether to support the “Hispanic race” question, said the Census Bureau has held more than 60 focus groups in the past couple of years to get feedback on proposed changes.

“One of the things they seemed to find is by combining the two questions, you get a better response rate,” he said. “It was clearer to people and more inclusive.”

For Falcon and others, what's crucial is Latino involvement sooner rather than later.

“The census is a big event for us every 10 years,” he said. “Meanwhile, these guys are making all kinds of decisions for us. We have to be part of the discussion, because it's so critical to the work we do in the community, in civil rights, redistricting, health care and in, apparently, reintroducing us to America every 10 years.”

“This is just the beginning of a very long conversation.”

Falcon also noted the irony of the proposal as the U.S. Latino population is growing ever larger and more multiethnic.

“Why simplify the questions when the Latino community is getting more complex?” he asked.